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Saturday, 23 November 2013

A different way to roast lamb

I am very partial to a nice leg of roast lamb, but I was looking for a way to cook it that was something other than plain roast. This is what I came up with.

I started with a piece of leg meat that had been "butterflied". This means that the bone has been removed, making a flatter, wider joint.﻿ The piece that I bought was actually quite thick, more like the cut known as "rump". I cut it into two pieces, for easier serving, and then marinated it for about four hours in a marinade made from chopped Garlic, Rosemary and Thyme bound together with some vegetable oil:

The meat marinating

I then arranged the meat on a rack above a roasting-tin filled with potatoes, onions and Flageolet Beans covered with stock. This meant that as the meat cooked (25 minutes per 500g plus 25 minutes - at 190C), juices from it dripped down into the dish below, producing a lovely flavoursome gravy. Making gravy often means a last-minute panic just when you need to be carving meat and dishing-up vegetables, but my dish avoids all that.

I did find though that since I needed to use quite a lot of stock to keep the potatoes mostly submerged the gravy came out fairly thin, and at the last minute I thickened it with some slaked cornflower. Other than that, the dish turned out just as I had hoped it would:

Although the skin was nice and crisp, the meat stayed really moist and tender. I think this may have been partially due to the fact that the stock produced a fair bit of steam. And I just love the combination of creamy beans and soft potatoes infused with lamb-ey juices! I served the dish with some broccoli just to add a bit of colour, but I have to say that the broccoli was definitely a minor element of this meal.

Looks delicious, Mark. We don't often do lamb because it is very expensive. My favorite recipe for a butterflied leg is a Julia Child recipe that marinates it in olive oil, soy sauce, lemon juice, garlic and rosemary. Then it gets thrown on a charcoal grill. Definitely a summertime recipe that doesn't have the advantage of potatoes and beans cooked in lamb drippings.